Research interests

Biography

Prior to arriving at ANU I held an ARC-funded Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Sydney and a lectureship in English at the University of Tasmania. I completed a PhD in English at the University of Queensland in 2006.

I was appointed to the ANU's Centre for Digital Humanities Research (then the Digital Humanities Hub) in 2011, and headed the Centre from 2011 to 2013. In 2016 I moved to a continuing appointment in the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics. I began an ARC Future Fellowship in January 2018.

My next book, A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History, is forthcoming with University of Michigan Press in July 2018.

Researcher's projects

From 2018 to 2022 I will be funded by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship for a project entitled "Reading at the Interface: Literatures, Cultures, Technologies." This project aims to use new, extensive digital evidence of reception to progress a central insight of cultural criticism: that meaning is not carried by texts but produced in interactions between texts, contexts, and readers. It will create an interactive digital platform to connect scholarly work in Australian literary studies to public discussions of literature, enrich reading experiences and provide a vehicle for literary research that engages diverse publics and enhances understanding of Australian literature. Read more about the project here.

From 2013 to 2016 I was funded by an ARC Discovery Project to explore fiction in historical Australian newspapers. By analysing the millions of newspaper pages digitised by the National Library of Australia‘s Trove database, I discovered over 21,000 stories published in Australia in the 19th and early 20th centuries. These stories came from across the globe, including Britain, America and Australia, as well as France, Germany, New Zealand, Russia, South Africa, and elsewhere. Exploring their circulation and contents provides new insights into how literature travelled globally in this period, and the consequences of this movement for literary, reading, and cultural history. This project also motivated a reconsideration of the relationship of literary history to the archive in this age of digital remediation. Find more information about the project here.

More information about my projects as well as links to my publications and a full cv are available here.

Available student projects

I am available to supervise PhD, Masters and Honours topics in any of my areas of expertise. I am particularly interested in projects that employ new digital methods to explore research questions in literary and reception studies and book history, or use humanities methods to explore digital archives and culture.

Current student projects

As primary supervisor:

Tania Evans, Cripples, Bastards, and Broken Things: Masculinities in George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire